Before my career pivot to Technical Writing, I began paying the bills (technically before I even finished college) working in Corporate Video. In that respect, I was phenomenally lucky. Only two guys in my graduating class of 30 people in the Television program got jobs in the industry. I was one of them.

I loved the job. I loved Corporate Video. I wasn’t particularly skilled at it, but I liked it. At least for a while. Videography is an unromantic, grueling, and dirty job. Even moonlighting as a freelancer on television commercials on the soundstage of a premium ad house and working with famous actors was a grind. I wasn’t a pampered actor. I was a grip; first on the set and last to leave. While taping corporate videos by myself, sweating my ass off in a tie and slacks was the worst. I could barely afford work slacks; ripping out the knee while shimmying under an industrial press on the factory floor to get to an outlet ruined my whole frickin’ week.

Doing commercials, I was a cog in a machine. Doing corporate videos, I was a one-man show. If I was lucky I could hire actors. Most of the time I walked around the office, looking for a pretty girl to pull away from Accounting, someone photogenic who had twenty minutes to stand in front of my camera pointing to parts of a refrigeration unit.

And then there was the despair of sitting in the editing room, watching the playback of an actor I hired from Talent Plus for big $ bork a scene, and realizing I didn’t have a second take. Or I thought I had a second take, but there was an oxide dropout glitch in the tape.  Who could I blame? No one. It was all me.  Once I taped a ninety minute panel talk show featuring the management of the company, moving between three cameras that I was running all by myself. At minute 80 I finally noticed that the master tape wasn’t running. The record light was on, but the end of the videotape had pulled loose from the cassette hub before we started. A pinwheel to nowhere. “Who can I blame for this?” No one. It was all me.

I transitioned to only writing videos, and then only writing training, and then only Technical Writing. Writing is a lot easier. Writing rocks. It is what I was born to do.

I spent nine hours on the set of a film, overnight Tuesday to Wednesday morning. Back in the production game, but this time on the Talent side of the camera. An extra. Watching the crew work into a sweaty froth between setups flashed me back to my Corporate Video days. I was wistful for the joy of actually CREATING something raw and tangible.

…For about forty seconds. Then I remembered what a slog it was to handle hot lights and balance heavy cameras and set dolly tracks.

I remembered the pressure of the responsibility to make sure every shot on my storyboard was “in the can” before I cooled the lights and broke down the setup. I remembered pissing off the talent by asking for “one more take, for safety.”  That “one more take for safety” habit is borne out of years of bad experience with glitchy tape and aching feet. Bad combination. Aching feet are Captain Screwup’s complicit sidekicks. Aching feet will talk you into accepting a shitty take so you can break for lunch. And then you watch that shitty take for years and years and years when you train a classroom filled with paying customers, using your own video. A sharp stick in the eye over and over and over.

I tried to cram in a nap before I showed up for the overnight shoot. The production team fed us very well. They treated us with respect. They didn’t waste the extras; if you weren’t in-frame, you were sitting and resting.

Still, after nine hours of hurry-up-and-wait and “one more for safety” I was beat. I shuffled to the truck, counting the minutes until I could drop my head on a pillow. As I circled out of the parking lot, I saw the crew just beginning their massive break down of the set. Not only did they have hours of breaking down and packing ahead of them, but they had to put the comic book store we were shooting in back together and have them ready for business on their busiest day of the week, new comic book Wednesday.

No. Fun. I feel bad for ya’ son, but right now I got 99 problems and a bed ain’t one.

A couple months from now the cast and crew will have a film with their names all over it. They will have a self-contained, superconcentrated portfolio of creativity that they willed into existence with big dreams and funky sweat stains. As a writer of novels, I understand what it is to eek out a potential breakout masterpiece; that precious interim between when it’s finally done and perfect and when haters start kicking the shit out of your dream as you desperately try to huff and puff and keep that thing with feathers aloft. First you make something new. You push out that baby. Then you gotta sell it. Sisyphus and his fickle rock. Here we go again.

The writers, actors, and crew will revel in their hard-earned imdb credits. I’ll be eight point type that blurs by vertically in twenty-four frames or less. You get out what you put in.

Which reminds me. I should be writing.

Facebookers, consider this encouragement to follow Four Color Eulogy, the movie. I’m sure we’ll screen this in the Scotsman movie theater when it releases around Thanksgiving 2014.